Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Just when he had hoped to command the country’s attention with the publication of his own great book, Wilkes was distressed to discover that his past was about to catch up with him. Not long after the conclusion of his court-martial back in the summer of 1842, the four marines he had confined and repeatedly flogged in Honolulu sued him for damages. Not until two and a half years later, in the spring of 1845, would their case be heard in U.S. Circuit Court in Washington. The trial attracted yet another crowd of Exploring Expedition veterans, but this time, in addition to the officers and scientists, there would be a significant number of marines and sailors in the gallery. After eight days, the jury found that Wilkes had been “justified in all his acts save that of imprisonment in a foreign port and neglect.” Two of the plaintiffs were awarded just $500 in damages.

  The marines were not the only ones who wanted Wilkes to suffer, in some way, for his sins. After a long cruise in the Mediterranean, William Reynolds returned home to discover that Wilkes had maligned him and his fellow officers in his Narrative. Reynolds, with the help of twelve others, would spend the next several months preparing a memorandum to Congress demanding that Wilkes retract the slurs from future editions of his book. The memorandum would eventually be published along with a rebuttal from Wilkes that enraged Reynolds all the more, especially when the Joint Library Committee voted not to alter Wilkes’s Narrative in any way. “[T]he only result of our appeal by Memorial to Congress,” Reynolds complained to James Alfred Pearce, Tappan’s replacement as head of the Library Committee, “has been to afford the person of whose slanders we complained, opportunity to repeat them, with additional grossness, under the sanction of a congressional document.” Reynolds would then embark on yet another refutation of Wilkes’s Narrative that would expand to seventy-eight single-spaced manuscript pages and never be published.

  In June 1846, the Oregon question was finally resolved with the signing of the Buchanan-Pakenham treaty, establishing the boundary between the U.S. and British Canada at the forty-ninth parallel. This compromise was supported by the influential senator Thomas Hart Benton, who happened to be the father-in-law of the explorer John Frémont. Benton took an active role in touting Frémont’s accomplishments and as part of this promotional campaign felt compelled to question and criticize the explorer he viewed as one of his son-in-law’s chief rivals—Charles Wilkes. In his Narrative, Wilkes had insisted that the mouth of the Columbia River was exceedingly dangerous. Benton, on the other hand, was convinced that the river provided a safe and accessible anchorage. In the summer of 1846 he put together a pamphlet attacking Wilkes’s claims, and since it offered an opportunity to malign Wilkes, Reynolds, along with the other two officers from the Flying Fish, gladly agreed to contribute to the publication.

  Reynolds knew better than anyone that the bar was a frightful piece of water, and yet for the purposes of the pamphlet he was willing to state that “By the erection of a few plain and conspicuous beacons, the sailing directions for the Columbia will be more simple, and may be more easily comprehended, than those for the principal seaports on our eastern coast.” That the entrance to the Columbia River is regarded to this day as one of the most dangerous in the world is a disturbing indication of how severely Reynolds’s judgment had been distorted by his feelings for the leader of the Ex. Ex. In response, Wilkes would publish a cool and devastating letter that used testimony from the officers’ own journals against them.

  The continuing battle between Wilkes and his officers would take on another even more distressing dimension. Soon after the death of Underwood and Henry in Fiji, the officers had created a fund to build a monument to their fallen comrades. Wilkes’s family desperately wanted the monument to be located at a cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, so that Henry’s mother and sister might regularly view it. The officers, however, insisted that the twenty-foot-high white marble obelisk be constructed at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since it was closer to Underwood’s widow. This skirmish would go to the officers.

  With the publication of his narrative behind him, Wilkes turned his attention not only to writing his own scientific reports, which included his two-volume atlas of charts and the volumes on Meteorology, Hydrography, and Physics, but to overseeing the publication of the other fourteen reports. It would become a lifelong endeavor. When Senator Tappan retired as chairman of the Library Committee in 1846, congressional funding for the reports became harder and harder to find. “I had more trouble and difficulty in securing the appropriation annually,” Wilkes wrote, “than I experienced in the command of the Expedition.”

  A nation that had prided itself in its democratic scorn of book-learning was reluctant to acknowledge that publishing volumes about “bugs, reptiles, etc.” was a necessary expense. When asked to vote on yet another appropriation to pay for the seemingly never-ending publications of the Exploring Expedition, one vexed senator complained, “I am tired of all this thing called science here.” But for decade after decade, the U.S. Ex. Ex. would not go away. Wilkes’s relentless and combative personality was perfectly suited to being a nettle in the side of government. He would often be as much of an annoyance to the scientists he was supposedly championing as he would be to the congressmen he hounded for appropriations, but it is doubtful whether there was anyone else in America who could have accomplished so much.

  With the appearance of each new scientific report, the status of the United States in the international scientific community (once nearly nonexistent) would climb a little higher. In its reliance on fieldwork unhindered by the usual Victorian biases, Horatio Hale’s report on languages broke new ground in what would eventually become known as the field of ethnography. James Dwight Dana proved to be the “racer” of the scientists, publishing four comprehensive and essential reports over an eleven-year period. His report on Crustacea, in which he identified more than five hundred new species of lobsters, crabs, shrimps, and barnacles, would reinvent the field. Charles Darwin offered Dana his highest praise, insisting that if Dana had “done nothing else whatever, it would have been a magnum opus for life. . . . I am really lost in astonishment at what you have done in mental labor. And, then beside the labor, so much originality in all your works.” What makes this all the more remarkable is that Dana, who would eventually become a professor at Yale, was a geologist. When it came to his volume on geology, in which he offered evidence to support Darwin’s theory about the formation of coral atolls, the response was just as enthusiastic. The German Alexander von Humboldt, whose expedition to South America at the end of the eighteenth century had inspired generations of explorers and scientists, claimed that Dana’s work represented “the most splendid contribution to science of the present day.”

  Not all of the reports came as quickly or were as well received. Charles Pickering’s long-awaited The Races of Man was judged by Oliver Wendell Holmes to be “the oddest collection of fragments that was ever seen, . . . amorphous as a fog, unstratified as a dumpling and heterogeneous as a low priced sausage.” At Wilkes’s insistence, Titian Peale’s Zoology would be withdrawn prior to publication in 1848 due to its many taxonomical errors. Ten years later, once the volume had been overhauled by John Cassin of the Academy of Natural Science, the report was reissued as Mammology and Ornithology. It has since been called “a triumph of new science.” The biggest disappointment of the scientific corps would be the botanist William Rich, who lacked the erudition and analytical skills to tackle a collection as big as the Expedition’s. The botany reports would eventually be divided up among close to half a dozen different scientists, with the renowned Asa Gray taking the leading role.

  Gray had almost shipped out with the squadron in 1838, but the offer of a professorship at the University of Michigan had given him second thoughts. In the years since, he had moved to Harvard and established himself as America’s preeminent botanist. His high professional standing meant that he had little tolerance for what one scientist called Wilkes’s “quarter deck insolence.” As had
been the case during the Expedition, Wilkes could be infuriatingly dictatorial and obtuse, but in just about every instance, the scientists finally succeeded in getting their way.

  There is no question that Wilkes’s unceasing advocacy of the Expedition’s publications contributed to a growing realization in Washington that scientific pursuits such as geology, botany, anthropology, and meteorology were crucial to the progress of the nation. Almost in spite of itself, Congress began to see the wisdom and necessity of paying for expeditions on a scale that would have been inconceivable in the era of Lewis and Clark. As the country’s population moved west, so did a succession of sophisticated surveying expeditions, all of which, in the tradition of America’s first exploring and surveying expedition, took along at least one scientist. Between 1840 and 1860, the federal government would publish sixty works associated with the exploration of the West while subsidizing fifteen naval expeditions around the world. The expenditure for these expeditions and other scientific publications would be enormous, representing somewhere between one-quarter to one-third of the annual federal budget. Not even the race to the moon in the 1960s generated a financial commitment to science that rivaled the decades after the U.S. Ex. Ex.

  Gradually, but inevitably, the Exploring Expedition would be eclipsed by the very historical forces that it had helped to set in motion. Foreshadowed by Frémont and made an accomplished fact by the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the interest of the American people shifted from the frontier of the sea to the frontier of the West. Instead of whalers, sealers, China traders, and Polynesian natives, it was now mountain men, pioneers, cowboys, and Indians who captured the American imagination. Even though the Ex. Ex. had had such an early and vital role in the exploration of the Oregon territory and California, the nation would quickly lose all memory of the fact that Wilkes and his men had been the first Americans to chart Puget Sound, the Columbia River, and San Francisco Bay. Turning from the oceans of the world, the American people looked to the interior of their own continent, and in the tales of western exploration and conquest that would soon become part of the nation’s mythology there was no place for Wilkes and the U.S. Ex. Ex.

  CHAPTER 16

  Legacy

  AT THE OUTBREAK of the Mexican War in 1846, Wilkes was unable to secure a position that he thought commensurate with his standing in the navy and elected to remain in Washington. Reynolds was assigned to the Allegheny, a new steamship that would be plagued with mechanical problems. As he was forced to sit on the sidelines at the navy yard in Norfolk, his old shipmate James Alden took part in the capture of Vera Cruz and Tabasco; William May was wounded in action, while Reynolds’s younger brother John served gloriously at Monterrey and Buena Vista and ended the war as a major.

  After repairs were finally completed in the winter of 1848, the Allegheny steamed for South America. It was during this cruise that Reynolds’s health suddenly began to fail. The constitution that had withstood four years of abuse during the Ex. Ex. fell prey to the unmistakable symptoms of tuberculosis: chills, fever, and night-sweats. His wife Rebecca had recently lost her mother, sister, and brother to the disease. “Wonder if I am to get the Conzumption and die!” he wrote in his journal.

  In the years ahead, Reynolds’s condition would continue to deteriorate. After a winter at a sanatorium in Florida, he requested a year’s leave of absence from the navy, and in September 1851 he set sail for the place that he had called his “second home” during the Exploring Expedition—Hawaii. Rebecca followed a year later, and the couple, who would remain childless, spent the next few years on a one-hundred-acre farm on the island of Kauai.

  Reynolds would eventually try to return to active duty on a storeship in Valparaiso, but poor health once again required him to return to Hawaii, where he assumed the post of naval storekeeper at Honolulu. By now, both his parents were dead, and he had come into a modest inheritance. In Honolulu he met up with an old friend from the Exploring Expedition. In 1852 Charles Guillou resigned his commission to become head of Honolulu’s Marine Hospital, and the two former explorers would live out the decade together in the tropical setting they had first come to know with the U.S. Ex. Ex.

  By the summer of 1848, Charles and Jane Wilkes had become one of Washington’s more socially prominent couples. In December of 1845, they held a party to celebrate the publication of Wilkes’s Narrative that attracted some of the city’s most distinguished citizens. But it was just one of the many social engagements that had become a regular part of their lives together. As if to compensate for their four-year separation during the Expedition, Jane was almost always at her husband’s side. “[H]er gay & pleasant manner made her popular in the Society,” Wilkes wrote. “We really had a . . . delightful time.”

  That summer, however, they decided to spend a few months apart. Jack had recently enrolled in the new Naval Academy at Annapolis. Jane and the girls, now seventeen and ten, wanted to spend the summer in Newport, Rhode Island, while Wilkes determined to take his youngest boy, Edmund, on a trip to North Carolina. He and Jane had recently inherited a portion of a mining operation near Charlotte, and Wilkes and Edmund would use it as an excuse to tour the South. After inspecting the mine, they would head north and meet up with the rest of the family in Newport.

  For the trip, Wilkes purchased “a very nice traveling wagon” that he outfitted with shelves and boxes for provisions, clothes, and books. “Our intention was to travel from point to point,” he wrote, “and picnic the whole way.” After saying good-bye to Jane and the girls at the train station in Washington, they made their gradual way south, pulled along by two cream-colored horses. By August they had arrived in North Carolina.

  Unbeknownst to Wilkes, Jane had fallen while changing trains in Trenton, New Jersey, and badly hurt her leg. A doctor in New York insisted that it was only a bruise, but several weeks later in Newport, Jane began to feel ill. She took to her bed, and three days later was dead—the apparent victim of blood poisoning.

  Wilkes was at the mine when he saw his fifteen-year-old son coming toward him on horseback. “It was a damp muggy day,” he remembered, “calculated to depress the spirits of any one.” Edmund had picked up a packet of letters in Charlotte, and when Wilkes reached for them, he felt a sudden twinge of fear. “I broke the seals and my worst apprehensions were realized—she had died in New Port about a week before.” Unable to read any further, Wilkes gave the letters to his son, saying, “We have lost everything, our best and dearest object in Life.” Once back in their hotel room in Charlotte, Wilkes sat on his bed, unable to speak, as Edmund clung to him and wept. “My brain seemed on fire . . . ,” he wrote. “I felt shipwrecked indeed.”

  In 1852, four years after Jane’s death, Wilkes moved his family to a house on Lafayette Square that had once been owned by Dolley Madison. That same year he returned to Newport to tend to Jane’s grave, where he planted some of her favorite flowers. Back in Washington, he realized that he was in need of a change. “I was very dispirited . . . ,” he wrote. “My dear Girls were all in all to me, but they could not supply the want and prevent the desolation I felt, and it became evident to me that a new life was essential to my happiness.”

  Living nearby in Washington was a young widow named Mary Lynch Bolton, whose husband, Commodore William Bolton, had served on Wilkes’s court-martial board. Bolton had died about the same time Wilkes had lost Jane, and the widower now began to consider the widow as a possible bride. “I often trembled for my success,” he wrote, “and finally through my perseverance succeeded in being accepted. A new life at once opened to me.” Eliza took to her new mother immediately; Janey was initially less receptive, but soon all of them had settled into a contented domesticity. Five years later, in 1859, Mary gave birth to a daughter; Wilkes was sixty-one.

  After more than a decade at the Patent Office Building, the collection of the Ex. Ex. found a new and permanent home. Congress had finally established the Smithsonian Institution in 1846 with the understanding that it would
take over stewardship of the Expedition’s collection. But the Institution’s first secretary, the scientist Joseph Henry, saw the Smithsonian as a research organization, and one of his first moves was to refuse the Expedition’s collection. Like Charles Pickering, Henry was for original research, not the maintenance and display of a momentous pile of artifacts that would require a large, expensive building and sizeable staff. Henry was part of a young group of scientists who were replacing the amateur collectors of the previous era, and he wanted to reserve as much as possible of the Institution’s resources for the practice of new science—for laboratories and the publication of results, not specimen cases.

  But there were some influential congressmen who were determined that the Smithsonian Institution would become America’s national museum. In spite of Henry’s protestations, bids went out to architects for a palatial new building. The winner turned out to be Wilkes’s nephew James Renwick, Jr., whose ornate Norman design is still known today as the “Castle on the Mall.” By 1850, it was clear that Henry needed an assistant, and although Titian Peale was a leading candidate for the job, Henry hired the much younger Spencer Baird from Dickinson College. Baird’s personal natural history collection was big enough to fill two boxcars, and he looked with enthusiasm to the possibility of expanding the Smithsonian’s holdings, particularly since the many expeditions into the American West were sending back a steady stream of specimens and artifacts to Washington.